1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to web browsers and browser user interfaces displaying information related to web pages and or wireless application protocol (“WAP”) pages, and in particular to displaying title information of a web page or WAP page.
2. Background of the Invention
Web pages may often have titles that indicate their location in the web site. The main page of a web site has a main title, for example “BBC News”, and sub-pages add to this title, for example “BBC News | Health”. The deeper a web page is located within a web site, the longer the corresponding title. Long web page titles are problematic to show on small screens. Devices with a limited screen size and small display size may have a problem showing a longer title, as only a few words from the beginning of the title will fit to the screen. If the user has browsed the pages of the same site right before the current page, the beginning of the page title becomes irrelevant, and the end of the title is the more important one to see. The existing solutions related to displaying long titles tend to show as many words from the beginning of the title and indicate remaining words by adding “. . . ” to the end of the title. The user thus has a hard time to identify the pages based on the partial page title e.g. when, for example, the user steps back to previous pages via a history list where the page titles are shown or viewing a page with the partial page title visible.
Browsers such as Opera and Internet Explorer (“IE”) show as many words from the beginning of the page title as possible, and indicate the remaining words by adding “. . . ” to the end of the title. These, and other browsers, do not try to shorten the title in any other way.
Ayers et al. define, in their paper entitled “Using Graphic History in Browsing the World Wide Web”, a title-shortening algorithm that tries to preserve whole words in the title so the abbreviated title will make sense. Ayers also tries to preserve whole words at either end of the title. Ayers builds the abbreviated title back and forth from the beginning and end of the title, adding as many whole words as will fit at either end, and then adding characters to the title until the length of the title fills the width allotted for the node.
Chang et al. describe, in their paper entitled “Efficient Web Search on Mobile Devices with Multi-Modal Input and Intelligent Text Summarization”, a title-shortening algorithm that consists of two techniques: the use of abbreviation and automatic insignificant words removal.
It would be helpful to be able to account for the titles of pages already visited and account for the browsing history of the user, rather than shorten each page title individually without investigating the relationship of the current page to the other pages visited.